Talk:Original position

Veil of ignorance

The concept of veil of ignorance was referred to, and simply explained, in an episode of the TV drama The West Wing. In season 4, episode 17, teleplay by Aaron Sorkin, the White House deputy communications director Will Bailey uses the concept to illustrate the philosophy behind the Democrats' tax policy. The policy proposes to increase income tax rates for top-earners by one per cent. One of a group of White House interns asks why those people should pay more tax when they have had to work hard to achieve their position. Bailey replies: "In answer to your question about why the [doctor] should accept a greater tax burden in spite of the fact that his success is well-earned, it's called the veil of ignorance. Imagine before you're born: you don't know anything about who you'll be, your abilities or your position - now design a tax system". An intern queries, "Veil of ignorance?", to which Bailey replies, "John Rawls". PHJ 14:18, 8 October 2006 (UTC)

An easy way to illustrate the veil of ignorance is to imagine you are about to be born into society. You have no knowledge of, or control over, your social position, ie whether you will be prince or peasant, rich or poor, ugly or beautiful, clever or dull. Now: how would you prefer to see society structured? If Rawls is right, in your ignorance you would prefer his basic position and for a rule that says that everyone (and in particular the talented) can strive for advancement provided the people at the bottom of the heap are not thereby made worse off. - Pepper 150.203.227.130 12:59, 8 July 2006 (UTC)

Excellent summary! Thanks! Piepants 18:09, 15 August 2006 (UTC)Piepants

Another way to describe the construct is to think of game theory in which every player's choice of available strategies is the same. This sameness is constructed by having Rawls assume that his hypothetical world has players who don't know their actual available choices, hence they believe that their choice set of strategies are symmetric with respect to all players. That is, not only does each person know that he doesn't know so must assume the sameness, they also each know that the other players also know that they know this and so on in infinite regress. Rawls also assumes that each person does not know his/her own tatstes or needs or desires so that their utility or shall I say, anticpated utility function can all be assumed the same. Each player assumes that all the otheers have their own utility. Hopefully with a symmetric set up, we will get a symmetric Nash equilibrium solution. However, it is entirely possible that all players are risk lovers, so Rawls (sub silento) makes the unstated assumption that they are all risk averse or how else would they all select a maximin rule? John wesley 18:16, 15 August 2006 (UTC)

Rawls does not argue the theory this way. He merely modifies the veil so that individuals are unaware of the number of poor, middle class, and rich people exists so as to make it impossible to do the kind of probablilistic equations necissary to make this decision. Others have found that infeasable and have thus reverted to using risk aversion. CuttingEdge 11:59, 26 July 2007 (UTC)

Criticism

This needs a criticism section.Larklight (talk) 15:30, 20 January 2008 (UTC)

John Harsanyi

I removed this from the article: "The concept of the original position was first used by the Hungarian economist John Harsanyi. Harsanyi claimed that a person in the original position would maximize his or her expected utility, rather than choosing minimax. This led him to endorse utilitarianism."

Original position has nothing to do with "his or her expected utility". "Rawls envisages that contracting parties abstract not just awareness of their own, but everyone's historical circumstances, desires and conceptions of the good." (Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy) Therefore, in original position you cannot know anything about your expected utility, sorry. --90.157.254.206 (talk) 21:15, 28 April 2008 (UTC)

Aaaand, another thing: Harsanyi's essay was published in 1982, while Rawls' book was published in 1971. --90.157.254.206 (talk) 21:47, 28 April 2008 (UTC)

Harsanyi addressed this first in his 1953 paper. An agent's expected utility behind the veil is the probability they are of some type (with associated income, productivity, preferences etc etc.) times the probability they are that type, which is just taken from the distribution of types in the real world. There is absolutely no problem with talking about expected utility behind the veil. In light of this I'm reverting the edit. -- cfp (talk) 15:45, 22 May 2008 (UTC)

Relation to theory of Eugenics

Is Original position related to the theory of Eugenics as it was defined by Francis Galton?

Eugenics

Though no agreement could be reached as to absolute morality, the essentials of Eugenics may be easily defined. All creatures would agree that it was better to be healthy than sick, vigorous than weak, well fitted than ill-fitted for their part in life. In short that it was better to be good rather than bad specimens of their kind, whatever that kind might be. So with men.

Essays in Eugenics by Francis Galton, p. 36

I know that Galton's theory about Eugenics was produced and published much earlier than Original position, but I see a resemblance here. --Uikku (talk) 20:45, 8 August 2011 (UTC)

Not in the slightest. What Galton is describing there is a presumed preference in characteristics. Rawls is constructing a situation in which preference cannot be known. They are mutually opposing. — Sasuke Sarutobi (talk) 14:24, 16 April 2018 (UTC)

In popular culture

The original position construction reminds me of an episode of Doctor Who ("The Day of the Doctor"), in which two parties negotiating a peace treaty (one of which are a group of shapeshifters identical to the other party) have had their memories wiped, resulting in neither party knowing which group they actually belong to, and therefore negotiating a treaty that is equally favourable to both groups. This strikes me as certainly resembling the mechanism in the original position. Does anyone know of mention of this being an explicit inspiration? — Sasuke Sarutobi (talk) 14:29, 16 April 2018 (UTC)

Merge Proposal: Veil of Ignorance > Original Position

Veil of ignorance seems to be keen on giving credit to thinkers before Rawls who dealt with social contracts and came up with similar thought experiments, however, the page does not make a convincing case and lacks sources supporting that idea. It seems to me that whatever credit is due can be given here on this page. But I don't know if I'm missing some important facts. If I'm not mistaken, though, then I think we should merge VoI into this page. DolyaIskrina (talk) 04:07, 4 October 2020 (UTC)

For those who didn't notice, at Talk:Veil of ignorance, I pointed out: "Veil of ignorance" is a section in the article on "Original position" by Samuel Freeman in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. The lead of that article calls the veil of ignorance "the main distinguishing feature of the original position". Following the example of the SEP article, I recommended merging and redirecting Veil of ignorance to Original position and put the first occurrence of "veil of ignorance" in boldface per WP:R#PLA. Add the redirect to the categories Category:Concepts in ethics, Category:Philosophical analogies, and Category:Thought experiments in ethics. Biogeographist (talk) 16:07, 4 October 2020 (UTC)

I don't know much about this topic; I found the entry because I knew the phrase 'veil of ignorance' and Googled for it. It sounds like it would make sense to merge the pages, but I suggest it would be helpful to keep the well known phrase 'veil of ignorance' prominent in the lead to help orientate general readers like me. Alarichall (talk) 12:16, 7 November 2020 (UTC)

Conception of the Good

I looked at this article after seeing this edit (a merge proposal) on the talk page. I noted the incomplete sentence in the lead section reading, "Conception of the Good (an individual's idea of how to lead a good life)." "WTF???", think I.

Looking back, I found that the incmplete sentence appeared in this 2011 edit. I didn't understand that either, but I saw that the edit summary there said that the edit was based on the Justice as Fairness article. Glancing at that article, I see that it does not mention "Conception of the Good".

This needs a look by someone who understands both political philosophy and English grammar. Wtmitchell (talk) (earlier Boracay Bill) 09:33, 4 October 2020 (UTC)

I found 7 references to "conception of the good" in this article on the OP. So I guess it's legit. DolyaIskrina (talk) 18:55, 18 October 2020 (UTC)

Misleading Formulation Regarding Maximin

The following statement in the article is misleading in my opinion:

"The reason that the least well off member gets benefited is that it is argued that under the veil of ignorance people will act as if they were risk-averse. The original position is a unique and irrevocable choice about all the most important social goods, and they do not know the probability they will become any particular member of society. As insurance against the worst possible outcome, they will pick rules that maximize the benefits given to the minimum outcome (maximin). "

It seems to imply that the difference principle is choosen out of an argument based on the maximin rule. However, Rawls does not believe this to be the case. Only the basic liberties are choosen due to the maximin rule. On page 43 of "Justice as Fairnes: A Restatement" he writes in a footnote:

"[...] in arguing for the difference principle over other distributive principles [...] there is no appeal at all to the maxim rule for decision under uncertainty. The widespread idea that the argument for the difference principle depends on extreme aversion of uncertainty is a mistake [...]" (Rawls, 2001).

Antiph00n (talk) 16:08, 15 October 2020 (UTC)

Merge Proposal: Veil of Ignorance > Original Position

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section. A summary of the conclusions reached follows.

The result of this discussion was two editors support, no editors oppose. DolyaIskrina (talk) 20:49, 11 November 2020 (UTC)

---

Veil of ignorance seems to be keen on giving credit to thinkers before Rawls who dealt with social contracts and came up with similar thought experiments, however, the page does not make a convincing case and lacks sources supporting that idea. It seems to me that whatever credit is due can be given here on this page. But I don't know if I'm missing some important facts. If I'm not mistaken, though, then I think we should merge VoI into this page. DolyaIskrina (talk) 04:07, 4 October 2020 (UTC)

For those who didn't notice, at Talk:Veil of ignorance, I pointed out: "Veil of ignorance" is a section in the article on "Original position" by Samuel Freeman in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. The lead of that article calls the veil of ignorance "the main distinguishing feature of the original position". Following the example of the SEP article, I recommended merging and redirecting Veil of ignorance to Original position and put the first occurrence of "veil of ignorance" in boldface per WP:R#PLA. Add the redirect to the categories Category:Concepts in ethics, Category:Philosophical analogies, and Category:Thought experiments in ethics. Biogeographist (talk) 16:07, 4 October 2020 (UTC)

I don't know much about this topic; I found the entry because I knew the phrase 'veil of ignorance' and Googled for it. It sounds like it would make sense to merge the pages, but I suggest it would be helpful to keep the well known phrase 'veil of ignorance' prominent in the lead to help orientate general readers like me. Alarichall (talk) 12:16, 7 November 2020 (UTC)

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

Vickery and Harsanyi

@Max Qaly: Your edits that put these two in the lead and remove Rawls' name from the graphic seem UNDUE to me. Citing Vickery himself as justification for his importance is circular. It does seem informative that he used similar thought experiments, but lacking WP:SECONDARY that agree that his contribution was both prior and notable is UNDUE in the lead. I propose moving Vickery from the lead into the body of the article. On the other hand, I have found WP:RS WP:SECONDARY for Harsanyi, who is discussed in the Stanford encyclopedia article on the Original Position. My proposal for the lead: "similar thought experiments had been discussed earlier by thinkers such as John Harsanyi." But before I do that, if you have WP:RS SECONDARY for Vickery, LMK. As to Rawls' name being in the graphic. This is an article about John Rawls' Original Position aka Veil of Ignorance. The article should read as such. If you think Vickers and and Harsanyi aren't getting their due credit, please edit their pages or add their contributions to social contract or state of nature or thought experiment. Thanks. DolyaIskrina (talk) 18:11, 24 July 2021 (UTC)

@DolyaIskrina: Thank you for your comment! I have added a reliable secondary source in which it is stated that the "notion of 'original position' [was] developed by Vickery (1945), Harsanyi (1955), and Rawls (1971)." Feel free to rephrase what I wrote! I think it is fine if you restore the text that accompanies the picture. --Max Qaly (talk) 01:59, 25 July 2021 (UTC)

Okay sounds good. Cheers. DolyaIskrina (talk) 22:18, 26 July 2021 (UTC)